Jul 12, 2013

REVIEW: PACIFIC RIM (dir. Del Toro)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.Giant alien monsters known as Kaiju are
making their way through an inter-dimensional portal deep in a Pacific ocean
trench, and are coming ashore to reduce cities like San Francisco and Manilato rubble. The only thing that will
stop them are giant robots, or Jaegers, piloted by two humans, one for each
hemisphere of the brain, thus ensuring that the robots can tie their own
shoelaces and guess how you are
feeling. And if that sounds like a salad of just about every blockbuster of the
last five years then you’d be right. What can I say, except Arthur
Brooke and William Painter both had a crack of the Romeo and Juliet story before
this Shakespeare kid showed up. Advance word on Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim was that it was the
“thinking man’s Michael Bay movie,” and while thoughtfulness is always nice,
that’s not strictly speaking accurate. What distinguishes the two filmmakers is
love — a deep and abiding love of the genre, love of monsters down to the phosphorescent
tips of their tentacles, love of robots down to their last rivet, love of the
laws of mass and momentum, and all the unfakeable geekery that lifts and
propels every frame of this film. How long does it take to tell the difference?
I would say by the end of the opening credits. That’s how long it takes for
Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam), to lose his brother to one of the monsters,
with one scoop of its paw. When the two of them first showed up, two blonde hunks
strolling down the jet-way, grins the size of the Mariana trench, rock-n-roll
blasting on the soundtrack, you think: oh no, not another hymn to chiseled
American manhood.
Actually, no. His brother
gone, Beckett must instead find his footing with a new team, opposite a young
Japanese woman, Mako (Rinko Kikuchi), with a face as pale as lily and a Louise Brooks bob, who wants revenge
against the Kaiju for reasons having to do with a small, red child’s shoe. Del
Toro’s sense of characterisation is calligraphic, sentimental in the best
sense, almost Cruikshankian: everyone is outlined with bold, fluid strokes that
that lead them right back into the thick of the action. There
is commander Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), who sounds ominously Biblical and
delivers lines like “I do not want your admiration
and your sympathy, I want your compliance and your fighting skills,” plus two squabbling
scientists, one of whom believes that “numbers are the closest we can
get to the handwriting of God,” a line just
good enough to give the impression of sincere belief. For once the
internationalism of the cast feels rooted in something other than demography, namely genre. A
sequence delving into Mako’s backstory showing a little girl running terrified
down ashen streets, manages to invoke both Hiroshima and 9/11, drawing juice
from Japanese and American
movie-making traditions. Maybe that’s why the tracking
is soft.Blockbusters — in their modern
iteration at least — started out as an America form, maybe even the American form, like jazz and
musicals and ice-cream, and the story they told was America’s backstory: David
versus Goliath. “I don't ever want to
think you could kill that shark,” Spielberg told his actors in Jaws, a beta-male siding with the other
beta-males against alpha-dog Quint, the shark-hunter. “Aren’t you a little
short to be a storm-trooper,” Princess Leia asks Luke when he first bursts into
her cell on the Death Star in Star Wars,
another film sized to the asymmetrical fight of the little guy against the big
guy, because what brings the empire down, remember is it’s size; the Death Star
is too large to be adequately defended, leaving it open to a fighter craft the
size of an x-wing. Both these fights recalled the fight America had just lost —
in Vietnam, where it was the 900-pound gorilla brought down by a lighter,
faster force — but reslanted so that Americans could root for the little
guy again, a salve for the national dysmorphia which results when the world’s
sole superpower still imagines itself a scrappy, underdog.
No other form tracks this this
more explicitly than the summer blockbuster, for no form more explicitly sets
those two forces — size and speed — against one another. Think of Arnie
versus the T-1000 in Terminator 2, a “Porsche to his
Panzer tank,” as Cameron put it, an uncannily predictive of the equally
mercurial threat the country would one day face. Or the asymmetric warfare
waged in Avatar, whose largest dragon,
the Toruk, is vulnerable to attack from above precisely because of it’s size.
How the Mighty Fall: it’s the Cameron
theme from Aliens to Titanic, and one he picked up watching the Vietnam war on
TV as a teenager in Canada, amazed to see this giant of a next-door neighbour fall.
It’s precisely what has given his fantasies such a virulent hold on the
American imagination.

And it’s what makes so many modern-day
blockbusters so slack: they haven’t the imagination for failure. They are glinting,
24-carot dreams of success — quite literal power trips. The new Man of Steel
has very little time for Clark Kent, only for Superman, Kal-el,
this time reimagined as a demi-God. The Transformer
movies are boring precisely to the extent that watching two equal, opposed
forces thrash it out is boring: only narrative sleights of hand and deus ex machinas will tip the fight. And
why Pacific Rim is the most
consistently thrilling bit of blockbuster sublimity since Avatar. I mean that word literally: "whatever is fitted in any sort to
excite the ideas of pain and danger,” said Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Inquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) “Whatever is in any sort terrible, or
is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to
terror." The romantics found it in the seascapes of Turner, the Alps, the
craggy vertiginousness of Milton’s Paradise
Lost, the caverns of Piranesi andOpium
dreams. It’s not too hard to find traces of all of those in
the awe-inspiring battles between robot and monster, most of them at night,
some of them at sea, in Del Toro’s film. For once, the fights seem to be
observing known physical laws, absent the tell-tale whizz of most CGI, but instead
moving with the sluggish grandeur befitting their massive bulk — or as one of the scientists, appropriately named Newton, puts
it, “that’s two-thousand
five-hundred tons of awesome!” But
what really wins the day is the way Del Toro has rescaled the action to allow
human agency back into the picture; one delightful touch involves a monster slamming into the building and setting off a little Newton's Cradle on one of the desks. Best of
all is Elba, who finds a declamatory pitch for his performance that could part
the oceans themselves. “Today, at the edge of our hope, at the end of
our time,” he intones, like Olivier before the battle of Agincourt. “We are
cancelling the apocalypse!” It’s just a
power-chord, a bit of silly magnificence in a summer blockbuster, but it lifts
you out of your seat, and reminds you of just how thrilling these things can be
when they have a director of Del Toro’s imagination at the helm. Pacific Rim is
rousing, playful and unfashionably fun.If
audiences don't go for it civilization really is doomed.

Damn good, best blockbuster I seen this summer. Invests you in the human characters and their personal struggles, makes you care more about the big robot smashing, and said robot smashing is awesome, coherently filmed and delivered with maximum impact.

Great insight about that struggle of the little guy, Tom. It's always an uphill battle for the humans, a real honest-to-god challenge that can only be overcome by humans coming together. Cliche, sure, but effectively executed.

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R E V I E W S

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